Sun Life Securely Answers 10,000+ Queries Each Week Using Amazon Bedrock

In early 2023, financial services provider Sun Life started experimenting with generative artificial intelligence (AI) on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Sun Life launched over 40 experiments, obtaining numerous lessons across its global operations. It then set out to transition from experimenting to delivering value.

Sun Life quickly created value with a secure chatbot, Sun Life Asks. Using AWS, the chatbot operates within Sun Life’s safe and secure technology ecosystem to help answer questions for Sun Life team members, saving them time they can reinvest in higher-value tasks that deliver client impact.”

With so many generative AI initiatives running side-by-side, Sun Life has many opportunities to generate value. “We’re focused on areas where we believe that generative AI can have a meaningful impact on the client experience,” says Janet Weldon, assistant VP for data strategy and enablement at Sun Life.

One of the first big successes that Sun Life delivered came in the form of Sun Life Asks, a chatbot that safely and securely uses internal information to answer user queries. Deployed globally to all employees, Sun Life Asks uses Anthropic’s Claude through Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models from leading AI companies. Because Sun Life Asks is simple to adopt and use, employees are submitting over 10,000 queries a week.

Sun Life team members often save hours of work each time they query the chatbot. For instance, one market research analyst shared, “I asked the chatbot to act as a market research analyst and conduct a sentiment analysis providing the top five to ten themes with a theme frequency count. It easily saved me several hours of manual work.” With thousands of queries being made each day, Sun Life Asks is powering employee efficiency throughout the global enterprise.

In fact, Sun Life Asks resolved over 600,000 internal queries in its first 11 months. The next step is to bring some of the generative AI capabilities that Sun Life already uses internally to its clients.

As a global enterprise, Sun Life has the organizational capacity needed to scale great ideas. The company wants to verify that the 40 generative AI experiments it has conducted since early 2023 translate to a genuine impact on clients.

Sun Life has learned a great deal from its generative AI initiatives. As it continues to explore new ways to deliver value to its employees and clients, the company is focused on changing mindsets and upskilling internal teams. “Putting generative AI in the hands of all our employees combined with global upskilling is vital,” says Weldon. “We really want to empower everybody to not only be generative AI builders, creators, and consumers but also use the technology in all that they do.”